5 Differences between Cloud and Dedicated Servers

There`s a rapid expansion in the number of businesses getting online and multiple solutions are now being provided by the hosting industry to them in order to help them host their data on the right server as per their needs. If you are a startup, there are two major hosting options available to you – cloud servers and dedicated servers.

In a cloud server, you don’t need to buy and maintain any hardware as everything is ‘handled’ by the service provider, whereas the user rents or buys the server, software, and other resources from the web hosting provider in a dedicated server.

To decide which option is right for your business, it is essential to understand the basic differences between them so as to make the right decision:

1. Availability

Cloud servers never go down as in case of any issue, one of the multiple nodes takes over the workload of the failed node automatically and this ensures zero downtime and maximum network uptime for your website and application.

With dedicated servers, there’s a risk of downtime and hardware failure as they do not have multiple nodes to share the load.

2. Scalability of resources

An increase or decrease of allotted resources – computing cores, RAM, and storage, as per workloads, is very easy and simple with a cloud server. SparkHost’s cloud servers have scalable RAM, CPU, storage, and strong technical resources to boost your website performance.

When it comes to the dedicated servers, rigid specifications are there, and the scaling of resources is a bit difficult and time-consuming task.

3. Safety and security

With cloud servers, you have to trust your provider for the services and for taking adequate measures for security. Cloud service providers ensure data safety through dedicated IT support, secure and encrypted solutions, firewalls, and facilitate backup recoveries.

But in dedicated servers, you yourself need to take essential measures from monitoring server resources to upgrading your dedicated server to secure your sensitive and confidential business information.

4. Cost-efficiency

Hourly resource-based billing is among big benefits of cloud server hosting is typically pay as you go, that means you pay only for the computing resources that you actually use. With cloud servers, bandwidth, SQL storage, and disk space offered are a bit expensive, but they are relatively cheaper and abundant with dedicated servers.

Dedicated servers are generally billed monthly and you have to pay a consistent amount irrespective of how much server and resources you actually use.

5. Level of control

In the cloud server, one does not have complete control and is limited to offerings provided by the service provider.

However, a dedicated server offers complete control over the server as one can add applications, programs, and performance-enhancing measures to the machine.

Should I go for a cloud server or dedicated server?

The selection of a server completely depends upon your business goals and objectives. The cloud server is best suitable for e-commerce websites with unpredictable and fluctuating demands, cost efficiency of cloud server suits best to SMB websites, and is ideal for web hosting providers and for testing of new and basic websites.

But, if you are aiming for high performance, resilience, reliability, and full control, then dedicated servers should be your default choice.